About Optics & Photonics TopicsOSA Publishing developed the Optics and Photonics Topics to help organize its diverse content more accurately by topic area. This topic browser contains over 2400 terms and is organized in a three-level hierarchy. Read more.

Topics can be refined further in the search results. The Topic facet will reveal the high-level topics associated with the articles returned in the search results.

Abstract

Optical triggering via direct bleaching of a Cr:YAG saturable absorber was applied to a monolithic Nd:YAG/Cr:YAG laser crystal. The method uses a single laser diode bar to bleach a thin sheet within the saturable absorber from a direction orthogonal to the lasing axis. By placing the Q-switch at the time corresponding to the steepest slope (dT/dt) for change in transmission during bleaching, the pulse-to-pulse timing jitter showed a 13.2× reduction in standard deviation, from 132ns for free-running operation to 10ns with optical triggering. We measured that a fluence of 60kW/cm2 was sufficient to enable optical triggering, where a diode appropriately sized for the length of the Cr:YAG (∼3mm) would then require only ∼150W of optical power over a 1–2μs duration to enable effective jitter reduction. Additionally, we measured an increase in optical-to-optical efficiency with optical triggering, where the efficiency improved from 12% to 13.5%.

References

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Citation lists with outbound citation links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.